Monzo Staff Weekly Q&A - Jarno Wolf (COps Financial Crime Specialist & Squad Captain)

[JarnoWolf]

@jtame

What tooling do you use to monitor suspicious behaviour?

Have the COPs staff been trained to identify issues that are not always obvious over in-app chat?

Do the staff get trained on voice patterns?

Our fantastic security engineers have built a transaction monitoring engine that uses a set of rules alongside machine learning to flag suspicious activity for us to take a closer look at, that’s one of our main tools. Another thing we have in our arsenal is a COps team (and actually a whole company) that is trained to spot the indicators of fincrime, even when they’re very subtle

[JarnoWolf]

@Doherty

Forgive my ignorance, I don’t mean this in a stupid way. But…

Why do monzo care about fin crime? Because it’s bad for their customers, or because it personally costs them money, or because there is legislation in place forcing you to give a shit?

I presume realistically it’s all three? But if you could elaborate a bit that would be sweet

You’re right, it’s a combination of all 3, I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking about fincrime as just fraud, whereas it’s a much wider scope.

From a fraud perspective it’s fairly cut and dry, we don’t want people (Monzo users or customers of other banks) to lose money to criminals, and we ourselves don’t want to lose money to criminals.

In a wider sense the impact of things like bribery and corruption, trafficking, terrorist financing, organised crime, tax avoidance etc. have on society can be huge. All these things touch the financial world at some point and beyond our regulatory obligations to stop this kind of thing it’s something we feel is right to do, and do well.

[JarnoWolf]

@JarnoWolf

Im not 100% sure what you mean by fincrime by the merchant in this case, is that a rogue merchant making unauthorised charges to a Monzo card?

@anon44204028

yep. Not the Monzo account holder committing crimes…but a merchant fraudulently processing a transaction with a Monzo card, be it a stolen active Monzo card presented for payment by a non Monzo customer (before it is frozen) or a card stolen in the mail (e.g. by a corrupt Royal Mail employee) used to attempt to draw funds (before activation).

Cheers for clarifying, along with the frontline team we investigate this kind of thing and stop it. It’s an interesting side of the role, I have less experience in it personally but it’s made for some interesting work in the past where I’ve been involved.

[JarnoWolf]

@SC95

Hey Jarno, thanks for this. A follow up, what happens to the customers you catch doing this? Do you block them getting Monzo account and is their a procedure to report this to Credit Reference agencies so other Banks can be alerted? Lastly because its a crime do Monzo report each of these to authorities?

They’ll have their accounts closed where we can return stolen funds we do that too and we’ll chat to the banks involved if need be to make sure that’s sorted. There’s a requirement to report financial crime to the authorities so we do that, the exact form that takes depends on the type of crime being committed, it can be a fair amount of admin sometimes

[simonb]

Amazing Q&A - thanks @JarnoWolf for doing this!

I feel like we’ve all learned a lot about the world of financial crime.

Thanks to all who asked questions - we’ll be back next week with another Staff Q&A